You Gotta Go There To Come Back
by thedeadparrot
Summary: Superman travels to Krypton.
1. Chapter 1

The ship is small and cramped. It was hard to build, even with the fortresses resources at his disposal. It's dead technology, old and nearly forgotten (and decades, centuries ahead of anything Earth has to offer). It looks like the ship that has been resting underneath the Kent farm for over twenty years, but bigger, able to carry a full grown man (Kryptonian).

The crystals of his ship glow at odd moments, absorbing the light of the stars as they move past. Sometimes, he likes to watch the ways the crystals catch and refract the light, the patterns they create on the inside of the ship.

Most of the time, he sleeps. Sometimes, he dreams.

_He dreams of his father, not Jonathan Kent, but Jor-El, sitting on a pail at the edge of the farm. His white hair glows softly in the morning light. He is wearing a flannel shirt and overalls._

_His father's eyes squint at the sky, and his voice seems to talk of rain, the way Jonathan Kent did, but in Jor-El's voice. His hands gesture toward the sun, to the pasture, where the cows used to graze._

_The cows are dead, though, all laid out on the grass, and the sky around them dims and grays. His father is speaking of Zandronian philosophy now._

_"They do not view death as an end," he is saying. "And you should not, either, my son."_

It is quiet in space. The vacuum carries no sound. When his back begins to cramp, and his body begins to weaken, he'll leave the confines of the ship to absorb the light of a passing yellow sun, to stare out into the vastness of space and feel very small.

He remembers reading a in a textbook in high school that you can go crazy from too much quiet. He remembered that before leaving, and brought along a crystal full of old Kryptonian stories. There are a lot of them.

He also remembers reading that there are only 7 plots in the entire world, that they're told over and over again, with different details each time. He thinks the same thing applies to Kryptonian stories, too.

But that does not mean he doesn't like to fall asleep to the sound of his mother's voice as she tells him for the tenth time, the story of how Zon-Gur defeated the Winged Beast of Dandahu.

_He dreams that he is Kar of the House of Em, who defeated the House of Van in a glorious battle in order to restore his House to its rightful place amongst the Council. In his dream, Lex Luthor is Bertron-Van, his bald head looking out of place on top of his Kryptonian finery. They are standing on a battlefield (which is Krypton and America both), dead soldiers at their feet._

_It is beautiful and terrible at the same time._ _Around them, the skies split open, and it beings to rain, larges heavy dropplets that splatter across his face and hand and blade._

_"Now we battle to the death, Kar-Em son of Ran-Em," Luthor/Van says. His teeth are white, and his smile is cold and vicious. "Now we shall see who shall be victorious."_

_Around them, jagged white crystals, ice formations leap out of the ground, reaching for the sky._

There are many things he misses about Earth. His mom's cooking (because there's nothing like it anywhere else, he knows), noise (because he had lived on a planet's worth of noise for most of his life), talking (because he has nothing to say to the emptiness, and the emptiness returns the favor), Lois (because the lack of her is almost a physical ache).

He misses Jimmy and the Planet and the planet and the oceans and the plains and his old high school jacket and the picture of him and Lana in front of the Kent farm and the pen he stole off of Lois' desk and the sight of a smiling child and the collection of articles he kept that he really liked and the feeling of lifting something bigger than his body and the cheesy children's sci-fi/fantasy movies he'd loved as a kid and the sun in the morning and the moon at night and the buzz of the newsroom and the laughter of people entirely too drunk.

He misses everything.

But then he remembers that Krypton is still out there, waiting.

_  
He dreams that he is standing on the edge of an icy cliff, and that Lois stands next to him, and that they are dressed in fine, Kryptonian robes. In Lois' arms, there is a child wrapped in a red blanket (cape)._

_Her hair is pulled up into an elaborate bun, and her lips and fingernails are painted a red, sci-fi villainess red, and her eyes are dark against the pale white of her face. She calls him Kal-El in a voice he doesn't recognize._

_He thinks the ice beneath his feet is crumbling, but the world around him is silent, in a way that reminds of the vastness of space. Lois grabs his arm, and her fingernails dig into his skin, leaving behind pale marks. The baby in her arms is gone now, disappeared, but he does not think of it. Lois holds his face in her hands as she kisses him. She feels like water, slipping through his fingers, over his skin._

_Overhead, the red sun explodes without a sound._

When he reaches the spot where Krypton used to be (where he thinks it should be), there's nothing left, just debris, the forgotten remains of a dead world.

Floating amongst the remains (in a lead suit, of course), he thinks of a grand civilization, ancient and powerful. He thinks of towering cities, libraries full of learning, advanced technology. He thinks of old wisdom; the remnants left behind in living crystals. He thinks of single legacies sent off to distant planets.

He thinks that, at the moment, he may be the only living thing for light years.

On the way back, when he sleeps, he doesn't dream.

FIN.


	2. Chapter 2

Clark has few bad memories of the Kent farm.

On the mantle, his mother has collected them, dozens of them, over the years. He picks one up and runs his fingers over the edges of the frame. It's one of him and his pa, out on the tractor when he was ten, matching grins on their faces. He smiles at that, the familiar image. He remembers that. The way his mother held the camera up and told him to smile, and he was half-focused on that, half-focused on the tractor.

"Clark?" Ma asks, a wrinkled hand on his arm, and he realizes that he's just closed his eyes.

"Just reminiscing," he says. Her smile is warm and gentle. "I miss him so much," he says.

"I know," she says, pulling him into a hug, because she's his mother, and that's what mother's do.

_Clark remembers the cornfields, stretched out in the distance. He liked to think of the corn as a maze, liked to weave in and out of it, hiding from Pa. The sun would slip through the stalks, and he would laugh, because there was a pure, simple happiness to those moments. That pure, simple joy of living, of being alive._

He has a new desk at the Planet, smaller than his last one, and he tries to fill it up, make it feel a little more homey, but it never quite reaches the same feeling as Lois'. It always looks empty in comparison with hers, not enough discarded papers, lying scattered across his desk, not enough writing implements, occasionally remembered, occasionally forgotten, not enough sheer force of personality that Lois carries along with her.

It's good to be back, though things aren't quite the same as they used to be.

There is always music to the Daily Planet, an orchestra of people, telephones, television screens, computers. Clark used to know its songs, its melodies, but things are different now. The instruments have changed. The rhythms have changed. Clark doesn't know them anymore.

But he tells himself that he will learn them again.

_Clark remembers late nights at the Planet. It hummed then, a sleeping giant. The janitor down the hall liked him, occasionally waved as he buffed the floor. Lois would frequently stay late, and Clark would time himself to the steady click-clack of her typing. He would want to sleep, to curl up and feel the Planet wrap itself around him, but there would be a siren, a scream and he would be out the door._

There are no suns that feel quite Earth's sun. Clark thinks this when sits in one of Metropolis' parks during lunch, feeding some of the bread from his sandwich to the pigeons. They flock to him like, a sea of gray wings, and it's something rippling and alive and moving. Clark likes that. He likes that they're alive, that they breathe and walk and fly.

Clark lived for five years without it. He doesn't want to do that again.

_Clark remembers clouds of pure white, that gave way when you flew through them. He remembers the smell of the oceans, the slide of rain across his skin. He remembers staring at the blue sky above him, as far as his eyes could see. It was limitless then. Sometimes, Clark thinks it still might be._

Clark is sitting at a desk in the Planet making his way through notes when Jason pulls on his pant leg. The boy is still a little quiet, but Clark thinks that Jason might be warming up to him.

"Hello," Clark says to him, smiling. "Anything new?"

Jason nods, and something in Clark's heart swells up, ready to burst. This is son. Someone he wasn't around to remember, someone he wasn't around to know. Jason holds out a drawing of Clark, a stick figure in a suit and glasses.

"Thank you," Clark says, taking the picture from him, and an oddly shy grin spreads across Jason's face. Clark inspects it for a moment. The ideal place to put it would be against a wall, but there are none next to Clark's desk, so he leans it against the photograph of his parents. "There we go," he says, smiling at Jason, because at this moment, it would be impossible not to. _This is my son,_ he thinks. The thought still fills him with an odd glow.

Jason nods and runs off. Clark watches him go.

The smile on his face does not leave for hours.

FIN.


End file.
